Tammy Gold, author of Secrets of the Nanny Whisperer.
Topic: Finding and achieving the gold standard of care for your child.Issues: The truth about nannies—what they do and how they think; identifying your family’s needs; conducting interviews, reference checks, trial periods, and work agreements; understanding “nanny speak”; troubleshooting to avoid drama, resolve problems, and handle any issues.

Timothy Wilson, author of Redirect.
Topic: Changing the stories we live by.Issues: Why so many self-help programs, drug use prevention programs; teen pregnancy prevention programs, and crime reduction programs (like “scared straight”), don’t work—and may even do more harm than good; how, by making small changes to the narratives we tell ourselves, we can create lasting, positive change.

Okay, provocative question, but I do have a point. When it comes to cigarettes, we all know what we should do: quit. And when it comes to reading to our children, we also know what we should do: story time for at least 20 minutes every night (or as close as you can).

So that’s why I was surprised to read about a new study done in London that found that less than a third of parents “read to their children every day and half say they are too busy to read and that work comes first.” And who’s to blame? Certainly not mom and dad.

The findings, commissioned for an annual search for new children’s authors, links the economic downturn with the decline of story time. Of 2,000 parents surveyed, 10 percent said they read to their kids only once a month, and another 10 percent say they never read to their children. “Half said their excuse for not reading was because they had been forced to work extra hours to cope with the rise in the cost of living.”

As someone who has read all of the Harry Potter books and all of the Series of Unfortunate Events books (13 of them) outloud to his kids at least twice, I’m pretty hard core when it comes to reading (I read to them and they read to me). You don’t have to be as obsessive as I am, but remember that kids who get read to when they’re young enter school better prepared and with larger vocabularies, do better in school, are more likely to graduate, and much less likely to get into trouble with the law (something like 75% of prison inmates have significant reading problems).